Histories of the Present: The Changing Worlds of Middle Eastern Artists

Porter, Venetia

doi:10.5040/9780755604432.ch-011

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…The heightened sense of self-consciousness Evans expressed in his journals, in the form of prayerful soul searching and scrutinizing his feelings and thoughts, are common in the autobiographies and diaries of Protestant religious folk (Heehs, 2013, pp. 3, 49; Porter, 1997, p. 3). To that end, the anguish and doubt Evans relays, his pursuit of spiritual truth, and the record of his intellectual discoveries paints a picture of a devout New England clergyman undergoing a profound change in his identity.…”

Section: Evans’s Journals 1850–1865mentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Taylor, 1989), is a related “lens” through which to understand Evans’s transformation. Montaigne called the self’s interiority “a room of one’s own” (Porter, 1997, p. 13). In his study of the development of the American self, Daniel Walker Howe (1997, p. 194) argued that 19th-century liberal Unitarians and Transcendentalists altered the character of interiority by advancing an “inward seeking religion.” In this democratized approach, interiorly revealed truths become a natural birthright of the self.…”

Section: The Wounded Healermentioning

confidence: 99%

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Warren Felt Evans: 19th-century mystic, wounded healer, and seminal theorist-practitioner of mind cure.

Schmit¹

2018

History of Psychology

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The Methodist-Episcopalian minister-turned-physician and philosopher of healing Warren Felt Evans (1817-1889) was one of the earliest practitioners of mental healing, also known as "mind cure." Originating in New England in the second half of the 19th century, mind cure spread through the country in the 1880s. Drawing from Evans's unpublished journals, I recount his struggles with chronic ill health and his turn to the Quietist mystics and Swedenborg, and then to the mesmerist-turned-mental-healer P. P. Quimby to procure both healing for his ills and philosophical sanctification for his soul. The transformational route Evans traveled reflects the mythico-religious journey of the wounded healer who suffers through a creative illness on the way to becoming a healer himself. The article places Evans and the mind cure movement within late-19th-century Boston's medical and cultural milieu. Evans's approach to psychological healing is explored by focusing on his mind-body healing philosophy and mental therapeutics as described in his first 2 mind cure books The Mental Cure (1869) and Mental Medicine (1872). (PsycINFO Database Record

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Section: Evans’s Journals 1850–1865mentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: The Wounded Healermentioning

confidence: 99%

Warren Felt Evans: 19th-century mystic, wounded healer, and seminal theorist-practitioner of mind cure.

Schmit¹

2018

History of Psychology

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“…And even so, I would argue, the notion of time we find in messianic movements is still more than this, for it goes right outside history, in the way Benjamin (1969) meant when he spoke of a particular revolutionary consciousness, or Ernst Bloch (1918) when he spoke of a ‘cultural heritage’ which similarly surpasses its epoch 37 . This, I would say, is based on an essentially medieval understanding of time, as Anderson (1991) describes it, which however is still able to form a continuing alternative to what Roy Porter (1996; cf. Porter 2003) scorned as those “traditional liberal-progressive tellings of the ascent of man” in terms of the “heroic struggles of the old escapologist self” 38 .…”

Section: Messianism and Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Of Grasshoppers, Caterpillars, and Beans: A Historical Perspective on Hmong Messianism

Tapp¹

2015

TRaNS

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This paper considers Hmong messianism in Asia and beyond from a historical perspective, arguing that its thematic repetition of themes and ideas requires a new understanding of subjectivity at the intersections of the psychological with the social and political. Hmong messianic movements have adopted a variety of forms ranging from the more indigenous to the more explicitly Christian. While the attempt is not to seek a particularist ‘ethnographic-historical’ understanding of these recurrent movements, nevertheless the contexts of colonialisation, mass migration and marginal social status are suggested as providing the essential background for such an understanding. Several different theoretical approaches to understanding such movements are considered, with some attention to major theorists of structure and agency. It is argued that ultimately messianic movements can be appreciated in terms of a kind of ‘anticipatory consciousness’, and are enabled to challenge current social orders because they are motivated by a particular notion of time, which combines a medieval and revolutionary notion of simultaneity with one of historical progression which is, however, not gradualist. A ‘central irreducible core’ of ritual beliefs and actions among the Hmong emerges from this consideration of historical movements, which may demand a reconsideration of older and largely abandoned notions of cultural structure.

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“…Unlike people from a usually only loosely defined ‘earlier era’, the ‘modern individual’ was able to make his (or her, but more often his) own decisions, independent of a larger collective (cf. Porter, 1997). It seems, however, that some degree of autonomy, some degree of agency and an ability to make self-conscious decisions were present in every time.…”

Section: Queering the History Of The Selfmentioning

confidence: 99%

How to do the history of the self

Hofman

2016

History of the Human Sciences

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The history of the self is a flourishing field. Nevertheless, there are some problems that have proven difficult to overcome, mainly concerning teleology, the universality or particularity of the self and the gap between ideas and experiences of the self. In this article, I make two methodological suggestions to address these issues. First, I propose a 'queering' of the self, inspired by recent developments in the history of sexuality. By destabilizing the modern self and writing the histories of its different and paradoxical aspects, we can better attend to continuities and discontinuities in the history of the self and break up the idea of a linear and unitary history. I distinguish 4 overlapping and intersecting axes along which discourses of the self present themselves: (1) interiority and outer orientation; (2) stability and flexibility; (3) holism and fragmentation; and (4) self-control and dispossession. Second, I propose studying 4 'practices of self' through which the self is created, namely: (1) techniques of self; (2) self-talk; (3) interpreting the self; and (4) regulating practices. Analysing these practices allows one to go beyond debates about experience versus expression, and to recognize that expressions of self are never just expressions, but make up the self itself.

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Histories of the Present: The Changing Worlds of Middle Eastern Artists

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Warren Felt Evans: 19th-century mystic, wounded healer, and seminal theorist-practitioner of mind cure.

Warren Felt Evans: 19th-century mystic, wounded healer, and seminal theorist-practitioner of mind cure.

Of Grasshoppers, Caterpillars, and Beans: A Historical Perspective on Hmong Messianism

How to do the history of the self

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